Matthew Arnold Quotes
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The World in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love: Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, Remorse, grief, joy.
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A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
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What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.
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All are before me! I behold The House, the Brotherhood austere! - And what am I, that I am here? For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?
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Sanity - that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.
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Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
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Only, from the long line of spray
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.
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Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt’s rope chops round.
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The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.
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And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well - but ’tis not true!